whacked

Late Friday night and my Blues lose their fourth game in five. We’re on the slide, bereft of ideas, accuracy, and class when it counts. They fail to ice my busiest week this year, the late nights up the country replaced this week by later nights at the computer honing and rehearsing my MM level one presentation.

Sasha and I arrive at the conference centre in Parkville at eight on Thursday morning with fifteen hours of mental health and well-being professional development ahead of us. Sasha covers  resilience, bullying and harassment, and teaching and learning. For me it’s the big intro, cultural diversity, understanding mental illness, and suicide.

We expend swathes of nervous energy in the lead-up to our first real gig. For two days in the office we sort through unpacked boxes that we didn’t pack in the first place, hunting for workbooks and display table materials. Sign-on sheets, name badges, butchers paper, pens and markers, stick-on notes, laminated sorting cards, coping cards, cards of all sorts—we locate and pack the lot.

We load Wednesday afternoon. Two trolley boxes descend in the lift. A prefab box collapses as we lift it into the car boot. We think we have everything except ourselves ready. We plonk ourselves down at our desks. I roll my chair round to face her.

“Sasha, we won’t be terrible,” I tell her. “We probably won’t be brilliant, but I reckon we could be very good. Whatever happens, I’m determined not to panic about anything.” She smiles; secretly we know we’re good at what we’re about to do, but worry anyway. We know we’re going to work well as a tag-team. We know we’ll pull it off.

And we do. We shake hands, twice, this afternoon when it’s over. I tell her I admire her skill: she stands without notes, a head full of thoroughly researched material and delivers it shiny confidence. Her fingers whizz over the keyboard and touchpad as she brings up film clips, relevant websites, and resumes her PowerPoint show.

I’ve been up till two and three o’clock, rehearsing, but I make my stuff up as I go, illustrating and colouring my themes with stories drawn from 35 years experience. We lead our audience through two days of action, thought, and reflection. The tables are littered with A3 sheets, post-its on butchers paper, and art works conjured out of play-doh.

We meld our group of experienced and trainee teachers. I tell the young ones they’ve restored my faith in education’s next generation. My colleague Sasha is the next generation, half my age, twice as savvy. We pack the show away, wheel the gear down to a wet car park. She drives the hire car home with its bootful of MM resources. They’ll go to two more gigs next week.

I trudge down to Royal Parade and the Number 19 tram. I sleep on the train, my head jerking upright and an eye opening at stations. I’ve not been so tired since I can’t remember when.

  

Rock on.